Fort Hays Radar Trip - August

By: ksterne on: Tue., Aug. 21, 2012 02:53 PM EDT (3021 Reads)

Aug. 22nd Update:

The final hours at the site were spent going over a few leftover items on the 'To-Do' list. What could be done during this trip was finished off and some discussion with Randy Ou on things to look out for in the coming months. Before leaving the site, some quick measurements were made on the interferometer phasing cards. Here it seems as though some more work will need to be done in order to get the interferometer arrays at Fort Hays fully operational. However, upon leaving the site, all 32 transmitters were firing at full power.

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With several transmitters out on the western radar and wires beginning to break on the antenna array, a trip to the Fort Hays radar in Hays, Kansas is underway by RF Engineer, Kevin Sterne. In the first couple of days at the site, problems along several spots on the array have been identified and fixed. Most of these problems have come from bad coax connectors in the coax cable going up the pole. Replacing these cables as well as patching up some broken antenna wires has brought Fort Hays West back online with all 16 transmitters firing.

In addition to coax/RF work, some work has been done to guy the middle of the 56' antenna poles along the West main array as on a couple of occasions the middle of these poles was seen to oscillate wildly in the wind.

The next 24 hours or so at the site will be tiding up business at the site as well as preparing for the next 3 weeks for the build of the site at Adak.